On the latest Saudi arms deal, the new Liberal boss in Ottawa Canada is just like the old Con boss and Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion’s approval the bulk of the Saudi arms deal could have been written by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. Well. If further proof was needed that the sunny new regime in Ottawa is perfectly capable of behaving just like the un-sunny previous regime, we now have it, in a memo that was stamped “Secret,” then rather inconveniently laid bare in the Federal Court of Canada. Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, wilful blindness and justification for selling billions worth of fighting vehicles and weaponry to Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive regimes on Earth.is still unacceptable. Dion explicitly endorses Saudi Arabia’s ruinous military campaign in Yemen, the victims of which, according to the United Nations, are overwhelmingly civilian. Sadly Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Sunni regime is grimly determined to suppress, by any means any demands for autonomy by Shia populations living on the Arabian peninsula. When Shia demonstrations erupted in Bahrain during the so-called Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia sent armoured columns across the causeway linking it to the Sunni-ruled island, which proceeded to pitilessly crush the dissent, imprisoning and killing and torturing and demolishing Shia mosques. The kingdom was also an eager and early bankroller of the Sunni rebels in Syria. That some of those groups were affiliated with al-Qaeda is relevant to Riyadh. Then there is the little matter of how the Saudis treat their own citizens. They have a hideous record of torture, oppression, arbitrary arrest and mistreatment of detainees, suppression of speech and religion, and institutional misogyny. Bur when the Liberals were in opposition: “Principled foreign policy indeed.”Once in government, moral outrage is a less affordable luxury. Canada is not any more hypocritical than other countries that shill vigorously for their arms manufacturers. Talking out of the sides of their mouths is the Canadian way. Also, it’s not like the Saudis are killing their own. Mostly poor foreign “jackals” and no bodies so who cares…right? You wanna know why they don’t care about the Saudis attitudes. The affluent are incapable of caring. Incapable. Elite: a group of persons exercising the major share of authority or influence within a larger group. Everything after election including lies, fraud is legal. for the Lieberals too. The majority of the electorate made it fairly clear that they wanted change. They have been screwed again. Don’t look for positve change under any Canadian regime as even the Liberals have no courage, brains or backbone to make their own decisions. Canada supporting a country that abuses human rights and importing their oil making them richer and richer and how much more hypocritical can they get… The liberals “change” was just a haircut… When it comes to war,surveillance state and pocket book issues neo-liberals and neocons are twins. Most are sheep led by corporate media

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Growing anxiety about weapons sales to Saudi Arabia is prompting the European Parliament is urging a ban on arms exports to the Mideast country. The European Parliament called on the European Union to impose an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia on Thursday, saying Britain, France and other EU governments should no longer sell weapons to a country accused of targeting civilians in Yemen. EU lawmakers, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of an embargo, said Britain had licensed more than $3 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia since Saudi-led forces began military operations in Yemen in March last year. Nearly 6,000 people have been killed since the coalition entered the conflict, almost half of them civilians, according to the United Nations, and the European Parliament said it was acting on humanitarian grounds.”This is about Yemen. The human rights violations have reached a level that means Europe is obliged to act and to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia,”Saudi Arabia, a country with an abysmal human-rights record .

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International concern is mounting about Canada supplying arms to the Saudis as the Canadian government waits for production to begin of weaponized armoured vehicles that Ottawa is selling to Riyadh in a $15-billion transaction – the biggest manufacturing export deal ever struck in Canada.

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The passage of the resolution in the European Parliament would not be binding but would be a moral censure of trade with Saudi Arabia and put further pressure on the Trudeau government to reconsider Canada’s role in equipping the Saudi military.

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Protesters in the Canadian capital of Ottawa demanded the cancellation of an arms deal with Riyadh, worth some $15 billion, after Saudi Arabia executed dozens of prisoners..

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“Canada opposes the death penalty and decries the execution of 47 individuals in one day in Saudi Arabia on January 2, 2016.” The Saudi regime has a history of locking up bloggers, executing critics and cracking down on dissent. “In the wake of these executions, we reiterate our call to the Government of Saudi Arabia to protect human rights.” in Canada Conservatives and now effectively under the Liberals: backing the Saudi regime despite its poor human-rights record. That is U.S. policy, and it has been Canadian policy, too, Conservatives and now effectively under the Liberals: backing the Saudi regime despite its poor human-rights record. That is U.S. policy, and it has also been a Canadian policy, too

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“The Canadian light armoured vehicles, or LAVs, that will be sold to Saudi Arabia are not mere jeeps. They are armoured vehicles with gun turrets on top. And they are being sold to an internal security force, not Saudi Arabia’s regular army. That force, the Saudi Arabian National Guard, is tasked with protecting the royal family. It deploys its armoured vehicles at protests. There can be no assurance they will never be used against Saudi civilians.” Some of the armoured combat vehicles Canada is selling to Saudi Arabia in a controversial $15-billion arms deal will feature medium- or high-calibre weapons supplied by a European subcontractor – such as a powerful cannon designed to shoot anti-tank missiles. This contradicts Justin Trudeau’s assertion during the federal election campaign that the deal brokered by the Canadian government was merely for what amount to “jeeps.”

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Canada’s condemnation of the most recent gross human-rights violations by the Saudi regime rings hollow . Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intends to play an activist role in promoting Canadian business and investment with a major trade mission to China who is another major human rights violator, China’s treatment of Tibetans , the Chinese they are also guilty of spying in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals clearly now are guilty of dual standards, hypocrisy when it come to making money and human rights concerns. Money comes first to them too.

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While Stéphane Dion, Canada’s foreign affairs minister called on the Saudi’s to “protect human rights, respect peaceful expressions of dissent and ensure fairness in judicial proceedings”, Canada is particularly concerned that the kingdom’s execution of Sheikh Nimr which could “further inflame” sectarian tensions in the Middle East. The move was condemned as a violation of human rights across the globe.

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Still Canada has ‘no intention’ to cancel $15 bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia despite Canada now condemning the executions of 47 prisoners in Saudi Arabia as the deal is the largest military exports contract in Canadian history. The biggest Saudi mass execution in decades – delivered by beheading and in a few cases firing squad – is falsely not moving Ottawa to reconsider a massive deal to supply the Mideast country with armoured fighting vehicles. The transaction will support about 3,000 jobs in Canada for 14 years. Activists allege Saudi Arabia sent Canadian-made fighting vehicles into Bahrain in 2011 to help quell a democratic uprising. The Canadian government does not deny this happened. Critics including Project Ploughshares and Amnesty International have cited Riyadh’s abysmal human-rights record

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The federal rules oblige Ottawa to examine whether arms shipment to countries with poor human rights records would endanger the local population. Amnesty International has cited the kingdom’s “abysmal human rights record” and said the Canadian transaction would appear to violate their export-control regime. The Liberal government’s support for the Saudi deal comes even though they have pledged to sign the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which regulates the flow of conventional weapons.

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Canada and the US are falsely taking side with Saudi Arabia over Iran. The Justin Trudeau Liberal government are not the peace makers they had lied and said they were during the elections. Relations between Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shiite-dominated Iran have been strained for decades. The oil-rich foes have also been divided over the nearly five-year war in Syria, where Iran is backing the regime, and the conflict in Yemen where a Saudi-led coalition is battling Shiite rebels. Saudi Arabia has one of the worst human rights records in the world today.

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Why the increase of Islamic wars today?

About 1,300 years ago after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, a succession crisis divided Muslims; and the widening schism continues to play out today. The dispute over how to replace Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim world after his death in 632 — and increasingly after the deaths of subsequent leaders — led to competing iterations of the Islamic faith, diverting followers into two major branches — the Sunni and the Shia with doctrinal distinctions created the schism. In History we also did have the non violent Catholics and the Orthodox split.

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The Islamic split began very early history of Islam. Those pushing for selecting successors as caliph of the Islamic State and as the religious authority only from among the family of Muhammad became known as the Shia, from the Arabic for “the followers of Ali,” a reference to Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Those pushing for a selective process based on seeking the most qualified from the wider tribal context became known as the Sunni, from the Arabic for “people of the tradition.” This was really a political dispute, but that political dispute early on over who should continued over centuries and a theological sectarian split. A study in 2009 by the Pew Research Center says there were more than 1.57 billion Muslims around the world, about 23% of the world’s population. Of those, 10 to 13 percent were Shia and 87-90 percent were Sunni. It is largely where those Shia live that has become important. The majority of Shias (between 68 to 80 percent) live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. In many other countries in the Persian Gulf, Shia remain a minority within Sunni dominated states. That makes theology increasingly also political.

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The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of thirir own Islam whose beliefs do differ from the regional Sunni-Shiite tensions They literally want to overthrowthe world and replace it with thei own Islamic view of the future. In 2014, after taking control of territory in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, ISIL proclaimed itself a caliphate, calling other states illegitimate and placing itself as the exclusive authority over the Islamic world, as if the world was the same as it was 1,300 years ago. SIL targets Shia Muslims as well as the West as it imposes its strict interpretations within territory it controls. ISIL wants to convince everyone the struggle is one epic clash of civilizations between the false Western religions and the Islamic World — with themselves as the true representative of the world’s Muslims and as their religious authority — their caliph, the scholars said. The ISIL also carves its bloody notion of a new Islamic State world wide lashing out at targets both within the Muslim world and in the West. They claim they do have restored the Islamic empire called the caliphate as they believe that the caliphate is required in order to properly implement Islamic law and Islamic governance. They consider other systems of governance, even if there’s a Muslim sitting at the top, as illegitimate as long as the caliphate is absent. Members of the two branches if Islam, Sunni and the Shia had originally lived together peacefully and intermarried, but this highly politicized, the divide also becomes next “very heated” and now lead to calls for excommunication from the Islamic faith. In the current context of the self-declared Islamic State, that means death to all, even the.Sunni and the Shia Islamists

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The notion of Shia now being the dangerous iteration shifted through fundamentalist Sunni groups such as the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also referred to as ISIS). For a while, exploiting the Sunni-Shia split served the interests of nations controlled by either branch. Saudi Arabia, is also guilty of forcefully exportating it’s Suuni Islamist ideology. The ISIL, Shia-Sunni split is terribaly important when the major backers of each branch are dominating influences in the same, sensitive region: Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The ISIL, Iran and Saudi Arabia has aquired loads of money and are now also able to acquire, and to finance many Their recruits, many ISIL recruits too..

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Saudi Arabia under King Salman is rejecting U.S. and European calls for human-rights reforms, King Salman surprised observers last year by moving quickly to position the kingdom even closer to the xenophobic Wahhabi religious establishment. These clerical leaders preach an intolerant form of Sunni Islam that denounces Shiites and other so-called heretics.

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“The source of Islamic extremism that promotes the sort of ugly brutality that is carried out by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) lies also with the fanatical Wahhabi strain of Islam, rooted in Saudi Arabia.

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Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the only countries in the world where Wahhabi Salafism is the state religion. However, this agenda does not stay in these states because it is actively propagated throughout the Muslim world. Over the last few decades, billions of dollars have been pumped into a huge campaign aimed at eroding the more moderate strains of Islam and replace them with the more extremist variety. If the West really wants to crack down on ISIS and make inroads into reducing the funding for the promotion of such violent extremism, then this means confronting Saudi Arabia, rather than continuing to bury heads in the sand.

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The policy of Saudi Arabia is in total contradiction to the interests of the West”

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And the war in Syria, being waged by Saudi-backed rebels against the Iranian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad, has begun in the past few weeks to go Iran’s way, thanks to the intervention of Russian forces last fall in support of the Assad regime. Meanwhile the citizens of Saudi Arabia o are beginning to feel the pinch from the deflated price of oil. Saudi subsidies that often are doled out to win popular support are being withdrawn and taxes are being raised to try to address the shortfall in available public funds.

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The Western allies have increased their military campaigns against the terrorist group, those in neighbouring Arab nations, seemingly better-placed to weed them out, have been mostly indifferent and why? it basically comes down to Iran. “Iran and Saudi Arabia underpin everything going on,” “The reality is that Islamic State is seen in the region as less of a problem than the prospect of an ascendant Iran,” The prospect of any meaningful military activity on the strength of 34 co-operating Islamic nations against the IS here is thus still null. “And there are certain countries that would like to see IS thrive as long as they don’t come and take their territory. Some are even funding IS so it’s a real can of worms.” “Their concern about IS, while a real concern, will continue to take a back seat until such time they have reduced the threat of Iran by removing it as a principle player in the region, and by removing the Assad regime in Syria, providing that Islamic State forces do not overthrow the government in Baghdad.. ”

Germany said it would “critically review” its future arms exports to Saudi Arabia, Germany now has warned Saudi Arabia that Berlin would review military exports to the oil-rich nation in light of Riyadh’s mass executions of prisoners two days earlier. Germany has already refrained from selling the Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles, battle tanks, and other offensive military weapons to Saudi Arabia. In the first six months of 2015, Germany permitted the export of arms worth over 178 million euros ($192.56 million) to Saudi Arabia. Germany is the world’s fourth-largest arms exporter, with sales valued at roughly $4 billion in the first half of 2015. Exports to Saudi Arabia last year included patrol boats, all-terrain vehicles, aerial refuelling equipment, drones and parts for combat aircraft and armoured vehicles. “A moratorium on arms exports would be the right signal now – business as usual is not an option,” CDU politician Michael Hennrich, who is head of the German-Arabic parliamentarian group .

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PRESSURE is also now building on Britain to halt all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia after Germany pledged to “review” its trade links with the kingdom. Amnesty International estimates arms worth £1.75bn were sold to the kingdom in the first half of 2015 alone. Britain has long been accused of fuelling that conflict by trading weapons and machinery with the Arab kingdom. Saudi Arabia has been a major buyer of UK weapons since the 1960s, with around 240 UK Ministry of Defence civil servants and military personnel working in the UK and Saudi Arabia to support contracts between the two countries. “UK bombs and fighter jets have been central to the destruction of Yemen. As long as Saudi enjoys the political and military support of the most powerful Western nations, then it will continue oppressing its own population and those of neighbouring states.” As the continued sale of arms from the UK to Saudi Arabia is illegal, immoral and indefensible. “Thousands of civilians have been killed in Saudi-led airstrikes, and there’s a real risk that misery was ‘made in Britain’. The UK must halt these arms sales immediately.”

France has now also condemned Saudi Arabia’s execution of 47 prisoners, including a Shiite cleric, and voiced concerns about growing tensions in the Middle East following riots in Shiite-dominated Iran. France opposes the death penalty “in all places and circumstances.

In Belgium, the Minister-President Geert Bourgeois, announced that he has refused an application for an export licence to ship weapons to Saudi Arabia.